Cindy Sherman Keeps it Real at SFMOMA

Untitled Film Stills
Copyright © Cindy Sherman

In 1977, at the age of twenty three, Cindy Sherman began work on a series of 8 x 10” black and white photographs in which the young, aspiring art student recorded herself acting out a sweep of female roles and types. During the course of the next three years, Sherman would produce a total of seventy of these images, which ultimately became known as the Untitled Film Stills.

The series, which takes its name from the once-ubiquitous promotional film stills distributed by Hollywood studios, features Sherman portraying a veritable catalog of cultural and mass media representations including housewife, career girl, barfly, and socialite, amongst others.

Though Sherman appears in each of the stills, astute observers quickly realize that these photographs are not self-portraits. Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), as part of the first survey of Cindy Sherman’s work exhibited in the United States in nearly 15 years, the Untitled Film Stills offer an engaging introduction to a powerful, challenging, and sometimes provocative exploration of our construction of identity and nature of representation.

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954 and raised in suburban Long Island, New York, Sherman came of age as part of the first generation of Americans immersed in television and mass media culture, influences that have both informed and directed her work.

Attending State University College at Buffalo originally with the intent of becoming a painter, Sherman quickly gravitated to photography despite failing her introductory course due to difficulties in mastering printmaking. A subsequent introduction to conceptual art, then emerging from London and elsewhere, galvanized the young Sherman’s interest and focus.

In the exhibition, we see Sherman’s oeuvre presented roughly in chronological order, leading from independent work (including the film stills) to a series of commissioned efforts. On display, for instance, we see Sherman’s almost diabolical parody of fashion photography, some completed as early as 1983. Instead of projecting glamour and desire, Sherman’s representations intentionally highlight the unappealing, showing characters ranging from the disheveled to the enraged.

Perhaps most intriguing, and in many ways most appealing, are Sherman’s 1981 centerfold series. Originally commissioned by Artforum magazine, the title derives from the horizontal orientation of the images. Richly saturated and tightly cropped, the close-up photos elicit heightened drama without ever clearly identifying the context, which some felt might involve victimization. Ultimately Artforum declined to publish the images based on concerns that they might be misunderstood.

Where the centerfold series absorbs viewers, Sherman’s so-called sex photos amuse. Created in the 1980s and 1990s during a period of heightened controversy about government funding of the arts, Sherman incorporates dolls and prosthetic devices to refute and ridicule conventional notions of art and censorship through a series of images that, while patently manufactured and unnatural, come across as (arguably) pornographic.

The exhibition also features Sherman’s history portraits offering somewhat comical reinterpretations of classical representations, some inspired by actual paintings. On view as well are more recent works including Sherman’s head-shot series and society portraits, the latter seemingly prophetically timed with the 2008 global financial crisis.

With so many personas in play, one is tempted to inquire as to who the “real” Cindy Sherman is. Andy Warhol once famously quipped “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Whether that disingenuous comment has any validity or not is open to debate, however, it’s very clear that just the opposite is at work in the case of Sherman. Nothing on the surface of these photos illuminate the deeper being of Cindy Sherman; instead her pictures construct an entirely distinct narrative, one that reflects more our individual assumptions and shared cultural predispositions, craftily leaving the real Cindy Sherman free to continue her commentary.